Dixon on Bitcoin

To Dixon, bitcoin had a mix of elements that he’d seen before in other technologies before they made it big, including the Linux open source operating system or, well, the internet itself.

For one thing, he saw a technological breakthrough. Through a new breed of distributed computing and cryptography technologies, the bitcoin community created the first global public ledger that could operate in a secure and trustworthy fashion. But more than that, bitcoin had politics on its side: Libertarian-leaning advocates saw it as more than a low-cost way to send money. For them, it’s a movement, and many of them have worked tirelessly to evangelize bitcoin. “Every interesting large scale technology movement has had a political component,” Dixon says.

But critics “systematically underestimated” the power of these technologies as platforms, he says. Platforms get developed. It can be hard to see where the improvements are coming from, but they happen nonetheless. “They get better at an exponential rate and all these criticisms go away,” Dixon says.